Joan says that she just witnessed her uncle, Harper's husband, loading bloody children and other people into the back of a lorry.
After repeated attempts to censor what Joan saw, Harper tells her that the uncle is saving the children and taking them to a safer place.
Act 2, Scene 1 is roughly 15 years later in a factory where an adult Joan has just begun her professional career as a milliner.
This fear permeates the work from the smuggling of people by Joan's uncle to the public march of death for prisoners of the government.
The theme is brought to its climax in Joan's final monologue where she describes being so afraid of the duality created by the propaganda of this new world that she has trouble walking home because she can't tell whose side a stream is on, or the grass, or the flies, etc.
Matt Wolf of Variety wrote that the final scene of Far Away has "an authorial vision veering not so much toward the absurdist as the absurd", criticizing the "didactic display of societal ills [...] There's enough latent foreboding in every second of Daldry's production not to need such thesis-mongering".
[1] Charles Isherwood of the same magazine asserted that the play is "a small, oblique masterwork", praising Churchill's "acute sensitivity to human suffering, her audacious imagination and her increasing economy of means.
Isherwood interpreted the play as a "reminder that the comforting narratives of good and evil that are often retailed by figures of authority [...] can be fairy tales concocted to mask darker truths.
[2] The Guardian's Michael Billington gave the play four out of five stars, praising the first scene highly but writing that "the journey from the farmhouse reality of the first scene to the cosmic chaos of the last is too swift [...] Churchill's best effects are achieved through the sudden injection of shock words that set off seismic disturbances.
"[3] Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2004 that the work is "a two-thirds masterpiece [...] Moving from mundane realism to ham-handed surrealism, 'Far Away' undercuts its own eerie effectiveness.
"[4] In 2006, The Independent's Paul Taylor praised the play as one of the best dramas of the new millennium, and argued that it "comprises three linked profound ponderings upon politics and the relationship between the private life of the individual and harrowing universal chaos.
[...] One of the remarkable features of Far Away is that it captures so much of what is mad and rigorously regrettable in our insane global polity while steadfastly refusing to refer to topical issues.
"[5] It was later listed among the 40 best plays of all time in the same publication, with Taylor arguing that Churchill "[finds] a brilliantly absurdist way of attacking the pernicious myth that there is a simple divide between virtue and evil, 'them' and 'us'.
Partly, this is because the play is full of suggestion and ambiguity, and utterly lacking in resolution; an effect that, in this case, is haunting rather than, as it would be in the hands of a less skilled writer, frustrating.
[8] Billington listed it in 2014 as one of the five greatest works of dystopian drama, arguing that "even if there is something abrupt about the transition from political brutalism to natural disorder, the play defiantly endures.
[10] Aaron Scott of Portland Monthly, who saw a performance at Shaking the Tree Theatre, wrote that "its thought-provoking flavors will linger well into the night.
"[13] Andrzej Lukowski of Time Out praised "how powerfully and pithily it reads on the page" and stated that Far Away is "Churchill at hurricane force, savage, hilarious, totally unlike anyone else.
"[14] Jessie Thompson of the Evening Standard dubbed it a "masterful work" and lauded the black humor of the writing.
[15] Sam Marlowe of The Times said the play had "moments that, with skin-prickling prescience, speak of the rising tide of populism, division, hatred and fear.
"[16] Alice Saville of Exeunt wrote, "Churchill subtly scrapes away at the selectiveness of the stories we tell to give our world value, to make it feel safe and cosy.
"[18] Aleks Sierz of The Arts Desk said in 2020, "I do love this play, but I must admit that – unlike Churchill's very best work – its meaning doesn't deepen very much over the decades.
Simon Stephens described the play in 2004 as being ahead of its time, remarking that "for me the strongest theatrical response to 9/11 was prescient and came before it, which was Caryl Churchill’s Far Away.
"[25] The playwright Alistair McDowall has stated that "It seems, through conversation with my peers, that the two plays with the biggest impact on my generation are Sarah Kane's Blasted and Far Away by Caryl Churchill.
A German production, entitled In weiter Ferne, opened in April 2001 at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz in Berlin, directed by Falk Richter.